The attorney defending Mohamed Diakite learned much of what he knows about the law a few blocks away, on Loyola’s Broadway campus.

Diakite, a management freshman who potentially faces decades in prison for multiple counts of attempted armed robbery alongside Chukwuemeka Anigbo and John A. White, hired 2001 law school alum Raleigh L. Ohlmeyer III as his legal counsel.

Ohlmeyer III comes from a line of seasoned criminal defense lawyers in New Orleans. His father, Raleigh L. Ohlmeyer Jr. of Plaquemines, began his 30-year career in law as an Orleans Parish assistant district attorney. After five years in the office, he reached the position of Chief of Homicide, Rape/Sex Crimes and Armed Robbery Division. Before he died in 2004 of a heart attack, the Tulane law graduate was also first assistant to the Grand Jury before he ventured into private practice, specializing in criminal defense, family law and traffic violations.

Ohlmeyer III, meanwhile, clerked for his father and later partnered with him in practice after finishing law school. In his time at Loyola, the Law School Criminal Defense Organization elected him as an executive officer.

“By virtue of his father, he comes from a line that specializes in criminal defense,” said Michael Perlstein, a mass communication professor who covered the criminal justice beat at the Times-Picayune for 20 years and crossed paths with the family there.

Perlstein added that the criminal courthouse on Tulane Avenue and Broad Street, where the Ohlmeyers argued most of their cases, “has its quirks and dark corners.” It benefits Diakite, Perlstein added, that his counsel grew up with one of the place’s mainstays.

“I imagine he knows his way around there,” Perlstein said.

‘HE’LL FIGHT TOOTH AND NAIL’

Finance junior Chukwuemeka Anigbo hired public defender Joshua Perry, while biology freshman John A. White opted for private defense lawyer Townsend M. Myers, a University of Chicago law alum that Perlstein said “was a new breed of public defender” in his eight years with the Orleans Parish Public Defenders Office.

“He always tried to give clients individual attention in spite of the crushing workload and assembly line of cases,” Perlstein said. Unlike many grizzled public defenders, Myers often took cases to trial instead of automatically speeding to the prosecutors to plea bargain.

“Myers isn’t the guy you hire to cut a deal,” he added. “Some lawyers specialize in that, and others specialize in going to trial and being persuasive to juries. Townsend is the latter. He’ll fight tooth and nail,” Perlstein said, adding that Townsend would meticulously examine the case facts to see if any one of them would allow his client a sliver of breathing room.

Myers, a member of the Louisiana and Illinois state bar associations, started his professional career in 1993 as an assistant public defender with the Cook County Public Defenders office in Chicago. In 1996, he came to New Orleans, simultaneously working with the public defenders office and cultivating his private criminal law practice. Two years later, he established the Law Office of Townsend M. Myers, where he’s handled “well over 3,000 felony criminal cases,” according to his Web site, nolacriminallaw.com.

“This seems like the kind of case Myers would salivate over,” Perlstein said. “You can argue that (the students) are over-charged or over-prosecuted. That leaves room to maneuver for a skillful defense lawyer like him.”

Ramon Vargas can be reached

at [email protected].